In the current business environment, it can be advantageous for a company to have a web presence. However, a gap can exist between e-commerce infrastructures and legacy mainframe systems that can present numerous challenges. Due to this gap, online business transactions cannot flow through, or be executed in the mainframe system in real time. For example, common and convenient e-commerce transactions can include paying bills online. Unfortunately, only a small portion of online payments can flow through mainframe systems, even in today's “high-tech” era. It can take three to seven days for the payment to be effective as the online transactions can be queued in a database for manual entry into a legacy or mainframe billing system.
Enterprises, such as telecommunication industries, can have many critical mainframe systems that can run operations for ordering, provisioning, repair, dispatch, and billing activities. In many instances, the users interfacing with the mainframe system can be production workers of the enterprises, e.g., call center representatives, help desk support personnel, dispatch technicians, and the like. In such instances, prolonged user-system interaction can harm productivity. To remain competitive, enterprises can require means to integrate their e-commerce infrastructure with legacy or mainframe systems so as to provide customers/users with a substantial real-time experience and improved usability. In addition, integrating the legacy systems with the e-commerce infrastructure can provide a consolidated tool that can improve productivity and efficiency for production workers and result in cost reductions and increased customer satisfaction.
However, replacing legacy systems to satisfy the needs of the customers and the production workers can be unrealistic. These legacy applications can be very secure, highly reliable and can handle large volumes of data, making them the preferred choice of large enterprises. Enterprises can be reluctant to change their stable applications because they risk significant revenue loss if the replacement applications fail. Interfaces to mainframe systems can be built using stored procedures or other mainframe development tools. While this may not involve change to existing mainframe applications, it can require fully understanding and programming the complicated business logic in mainframe applications in different ways, which can take an extended period of time. However, there remains a need for businesses to integrate web applications with mainframe systems.
Screen scrapers and Web terminal emulators that can enable consolidation of the legacy systems as well as provide a Web interface to these systems can be a suitable solution. Screen scraping, also known as screen-based navigation or screen-based data capture, can read the data stream intended for a mainframe terminal, either via a client based terminal emulator or a server based program, and can turn the data stream into a graphical presentation compatible with what users expect from modern desktop applications. In so doing, screen scraping can avoid making changes to the mainframe application while making it easier to use. Screen scraping can also enable fairly extensive modifications to the sequence of information presented to the user by combining several screens into a single graphical presentation, giving the effect of modifying the application without affecting the business logic.
Recent developments have resulted in major changes in the field of uniting Web and legacy technologies. Web interface to legacy systems can provide users with a substantial real-time experience as well as extend the scope of the mainframe application to a larger user base. Commercially available products can render the terminal-oriented presentation of an application on a Web browser without modifying the application. These tools can be easy to use and implement, but can have several drawbacks. They can be limited in terms of scalability, flexibility, functionality, and security. They can be suitable only for simple transactions and activities and the user interface may not be friendly.
Known screen scraper tools can provide underlying Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for screen scraping. However, e-commerce programmers can still be required to understand the business logic of the mainframe applications to build the interface to the mainframe system. Therefore, there can be a need to develop middleware that can provide a transparent interface to mainframe systems for clients and that can address the drawbacks of existing screen scrapers and Web terminal emulators. Additionally, there can be a need for middleware that can be used to interface with a variety of mainframe systems and can allow users to add or change the interface to a mainframe system without disrupting processing.